Innovation Quotes: The Safety Razor

“Why don’t you invent something which will be used once and thrown away? Then the customer will come back for more.” This advice, from his boss William Painter, inventor of a disposable bottle-cap, haunted the 40-year-old salesman, King Camp Gillette, from Fond du Lac, Winconsin. In 1895 the vision splendid came as Gillette stood before a mirror honing his cut-throat razor. The only part of it which did any work, and not much at that, was the edge. Why forge and temper a hunk of steel just as a backing to an edge? “I stood before that mirror in a trance of joy,” he wrote to his wife. “I have got it. Out future is made.”

Edward de Bono (Eureka!)

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